detail has disgraced our country for forty years. Within eight months
recently the state of Tennessee has been distinguished by three
separate burnings. At Dyersburg a red-hot poker was rammed down the
throat of the victim, and he was further mutilated in ways indecent
and unmentionable. At Estill Springs all the colored people in the
vicinity were made to walk around the scene of the burning as an
object-lesson. Of Henry Smith in Texas some years ago we are told that
"he was taken from his guards, red-hot irons were thrust into his
eyes, down his throat, and on his abdomen, and he was then burned." In
the case of Jesse Washington, a Negro boy of seventeen, in Waco,
Texas, in May, 1916, we read: "On the way to the scene of the burning,
people on every hand took a hand in showing their feelings in the
matter by striking the Negro with anything obtainable; some struck him
with shovels, bricks, clubs, and others stabbed him and cut him until
when he was strung up his body was a solid color of red." It was
estimated that the boy had twenty-five stab wounds. "Fingers, ears,
pieces of clothing, toes and other parts of the Negro's body were cut
off by members of the mob."
It will be argued, however, that only in extreme cases is burning
resorted to; but to this it might be replied that sometimes there is a
burning when rape is not even alleged, as in the case of the man and
woman in Mississippi. Indeed, it may be remarked in passing that in
only a third or a fourth of the cases enumerated each year is rape
even alleged as a cause. The theft of seventy-five cents, a small
debt, a fight, relationship to an offender, have all been considered
sufficient cause for lynching within recent years. Moreover, even
where there is not a burning, but a hanging, the circumstances are
often such as to disgrace our civilization. Thus, early in 1915, at
Monticello, Ga., because an officer was resisted, a father, his young
son, and his two grown daughters were all lynched.
What must inevitably be the result of all this? Such an incident as
the following: Very recently, at Gadsden, Ala., four little white boys
at play, all twelve or thirteen years of age, decided that they would
play "lynching." One of the four accordingly had a rope tied around
his neck and was slowly strangling to death when a passer-by relieved
him. The result of the incident was that the three playmates of the
boy were all placed in jail under the charge of assault such as might
have resulted in murder.
What is the remedy? Respect for the law of course, with proper
enforcement of the same. All too frequently, however, the law is
simply a subterfuge behind which officials take refuge; and this is a
condition that applies to many things in our American life besides
lynching. Asked a Georgia judge, however, in despair at the conditions
that surrounded him: "If the grand jury won't indict lynchers, if the
petit juries won't convict, and if soldiers won't shoot, what are we
coming to?"
How this all works out from the stand-point of the Negro may be seen
from the following. After the burning of M'Ilheron at Estill Springs
the Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People sent a telegram to the President of the United States
asking him to denounce such acts as disgraced the country at the very
moment that we were fighting for justice and humanity abroad. The
telegram was referred to the Attorney General, and the reply from his
department was to the effect that "under the decisions of the Supreme
Court of the United States, the Federal Government has absolutely no
jurisdiction over matters of this kind; nor are they connected with
the war in any such way as to justify the action of the Federal
Government under the war power." The Association then appealed to
Governor Rye of Tennessee to take action to bring to justice the
perpetrators of the wrong against the honor of the state. The Governor
replied in part as follows: "I could not anticipate that local
officers, whose duty it is to take custody of prisoners would fail to
accord protection, nor could any action upon my part be taken without
being requested so to do by the local authorities or court officers."
The Nashville _Banner_, however, printed an editorial, and the Chamber
of Commerce in Chattanooga passed some resolutions, and at last
accounts this was about all that had been done. The Negro citizen
accordingly wonders about his general position when neither the
Federal nor the State Government seems to have the power to protect
him.
Meanwhile these outrages injure us abroad. We look upon Russia as
benighted and chaotic; yet this was the country that hurled at a
distinguished Baptist minister, Dr. R.S. MacArthur, the charge that
his was the only civilized country in the world that tolerated
lynching. We speak of Pan-Americanism and the Monroe Doctrine; but
Professor Bingham informs us of a hostile paper in Lima, the
government organ, that printed the following headlines to a two-column
article: "NORTH AMERICAN EXCESSES--THE TERRIBLE LYNCHINGS--AND THEY
TALK OF THE PUTEMAYO!" And the Peruvian editor says: "Do you realize
that in the full twentieth century, when there is not a single country
in the world whose inhabitants are permitted to supersede justice by
summary punishment, there are repeatedly taking place, almost daily,
in the United States, lynchings like that of which we are told in the
telegraphic dispatch?" The natural result is to unite Latin America
against us, especially when the United States draws a color-line
offensive to South American sensibilities.
We call upon our country for a new consecration--to law, to order, to
justice. Too long has the crime of lynching disgraced us in the eyes
of the world. Too long have we eased our conscience with a specious
thought of necessity or irresponsibility. What concerns our country's
honor concerns every one of us; and as our Negro soldiers take up arms
and embark for France, let them not think that their loved ones left
behind are not protected. Let them rather feel that from our national
escutcheon shall be washed away every stain, that justice shall yet be
triumphant, and that democracy shall indeed find its true place in the
world.
V
ASPECTS OF NEGRO EDUCATION
No one who really studies the problem has any reason to be discouraged
at the results of fifty years of education for the Negro people of
America. In 1880 the percentage of illiterates among the race was
approximately 70. By 1890 it was 57, by 1900 44.5, and by 1910 the
figure had been reduced to 30.4. We may then not unreasonably affirm
that at the present time (1918) not more than one-fourth of all the
Negroes of the country are illiterate, and this in spite of the fact
that thousands of persons who did not have early advantages are still
living.
In other ways also may improvement be marked. By reason of a more
enlightened sentiment the schoolhouses in more than one vicinity are
gradually being improved, civic and social organizations are
constantly working for better conditions, and organizations among the
institutions themselves look to greater coherence and coordination of
effort in the future. The last few years have witnessed not only a
continuance of the work of such agencies as the John F. Slater Fund
and the General Education Board, but also the beginning of that of the
Anna T. Jeanes Fund for the maintenance and assistance of elementary
schools for Negroes in the Southern States and of the Phelps-Stokes
Fund, a part of whose income also goes to Negro education. Meanwhile
among the teachers actively at work have arisen different
organizations, notably the Association of Colleges for Negro Youth.
This association was formed at Knoxville, Tenn., in November, 1913, by
representatives of the following institutions: Howard University,
Atlanta University, Wilberforce University, Virginia Union University,
Fisk University, Morehouse College, Knoxville College, and Talladega
College. Since 1913 Shaw University, Bishop College, and Benedict
College have also become members. The general aim of the organization
has been to bring more closely together the colleges concerned for the
consideration of such subjects as uniform requirements for entrance to
college, the requirements for the college degree, the reception of
students from other colleges, and other topics of vital interest.
All such things denote progress. And yet, when all consideration is
given to the advance that has been made, there are those who feel that
with the opportunity still more should have been done. They feel that
the past is irrevocable, but that it is not too late to correct
certain errors and tendencies for the future.
What is the situation as we actually find it to-day? Go to any one of
the most representative institutions, and what do we find? Efficient
teachers struggling against most enormous disadvantages and frequently
dealing with the crudest possible material. The wonder is that so much
has been accomplished in the face of the handicap. It is not enough to
reply that in all the schools and colleges of the country the teaching
is irregular and the systems too lenient--that there is no human
perfection in fact; these Negro colleges are crying for a better
chance and they ought to have it. Go into any one of their high school
departments (for all are still forced to conduct closely affiliated
academies), and the actual attainment of many of the students exhibits
more and more the appalling shortcomings of the common schools. How
could it be otherwise with a system that operates schools for only
four or five months a year and that pays teachers twenty or
thirty-five dollars a month? "It was this way, you see," said one
young man who presented himself for entrance upon the work of the
academy, "we had only a three months' school at my home, and I went
one winter and my brother went the next." Said another, "I had a good
teacher in arithmetic, but we didn't do much in grammar"; and the
grammar may be said to embrace every subject in the common school in
which precision is required except arithmetic. Penmanship is
completely lacking in neatness and finish, and in nineteen cases out
of twenty the students from the country can not spell. Nor can they
read. Take them as you come to them, at the supposed completion of the
eighth grade, and ask them to read aloud a single paragraph from
Irving, or Cooper, or the morning paper, and very few indeed will be
able to get through without an apology or serious errors in
pronunciation or interpretation.
Grammar and reading and spelling, however, are apparent. Little by
little the teacher becomes aware of something more fundamental--the
lack of any adequate background for appreciation and culture. No time
had the mother at the washtub or in the field for Cinderella or
Mother Goose, and the childhood that should have been enriched by
lines from Longfellow or Tennyson or the Bible was nodded away by the
fire. Youth that craved adventure and inspiration found relief from
the deadening routine of the week only in the coarse pleasure of the
railroad on Sundays, or the big-meeting that came once a year. A
gymnasium, a library, or an art museum the young man coming up to the
academy in the city never saw in his life.
Such a background makes neither for accuracy in technical training nor
for the foundation of the larger reaches of culture. Within recent
years the problem has been even more complicated by the inadequate
school facilities in the cities. As the population has shifted from
the rural districts to the larger towns, congestion in the schools has
resulted, and the lack of an adequate number of seats and the system
of half-day sessions have frequently resulted only in the semblance of
thorough and efficient training. Nor has the matter been made any
better by the tendency in some places still further to degrade the
schools.
There is yet a larger question, however, and that is the extent to
which the higher schools and colleges themselves are fulfilling their
function. We do not forget the work of Atlanta University in the
training of common school teachers, nor that of Morehouse College for
the Negro Baptists of Georgia, nor that of Spelman Seminary for the
homes and Sunday Schools and rural schools of Georgia, when we raise
the question if such institutions are really doing all that they
should for their respective communities. We do not believe that they
are, and we do not believe that the fault is wholly theirs.
All of this takes us back to some very fundamental things. For some
years we have heard of a war between classical and industrial ideals,
and it has become more and more the fashion to sneer at the sturdy
pioneers who sought to instill into the minds of the recently
emancipated freedmen the ideas of education that obtained in New
England. Homer and Horace, it is affirmed, have no place in the
education of a man who is to be a leader in a rural community. The
whole utilitarian tendency has recently been strongly represented by
the paper, "A Modern School," by Dr. Abraham Flexner, published in the
_Review of Reviews_ for April, 1916, and reprinted as a pamphlet by
the General Education Board. We read: "Modern education will include
nothing simply because tradition recommends it or because its
inutility has not been conclusively established. It proceeds in
precisely the opposite way: It includes nothing for which an
affirmative case can not now be made out."
Now hardly any one will be found to object to this principle, though
when education in the large is considered many distinguished educators
feel that in arriving at its large aim the "Modern School" is not
altogether fair to some of the more traditional subjects in the
curriculum. So far as higher education for the Negro is concerned,
however, there is one point at which the utilitarians persistently
misunderstand those who do not wholly agree with them. No one better
appreciates the value of genuine industrial education than the
teachers in the Southern colleges. What they do oppose, however, is
that sort of large legislation which says that because the Negro is
mainly an agricultural race, his children as a whole should have that
sort of education which will make of them good farmers and domestics.
Such a program offers no outlet at all for the boy of unusual talent
and would ultimately irrevocably bind the whole race in the chains of
serfs.
What then should be the aim of Negro education? We affirm that each
boy should receive such education as would not only enable him to
develop his individual powers to their highest point, but also enable
him to fulfill his function most serviceably as a citizen of a great
free republic. Such an aim it seems not altogether unreasonable to
ask. Many Negroes will undoubtedly for many years find their true
economic place as domestic servants, many will be and should be
farmhands; but no scheme of education whatsoever should be devised
that would logically force _every_ Negro boy or girl into such
occupations as these whatever may be the individual capacity or
desire.
In Negro schools accordingly we ask first of all for that education
which will understand that all individuals are not alike and that will
so plan the course of study for each student as to enable him
ultimately to be of most service to his fellowmen. Logically no set
program of study can do this. The student's playtime as well as his
work time should be most carefully supervised. Here is a budding
machinist. His true bent should, by some scientific test, be manifest
to his principal or dean after just a few months of acquaintance. A
special course of study should be built up for him. His reading
should be so studied as to vary articles on mechanics with such
fiction as would awaken his imagination. He should be taken to visit
great industrial plants so as to see how they are operated, and any
inventive faculty that he possesses should be encouraged. Here again
is a bookish lad, one who seems to study always and who never wants to
play. One instructor would inspire him along the line of history or
literature or art, as the case might require, while the physical
director would (without the boy's realizing it) seek until he found
some form of exercise into which the boy would enter with enthusiasm
and which would save him from undue introspection and generally look
to his physical well-being. Whatever may be the special field, the
training should be absolutely thorough. We should rather see a boy
plane a board correctly than have him work a problem in trigonometry
incorrectly; and on the other hand we should rather see a student
construe Homer with precision than keep a dairy that is not perfectly
clean.
Any such education as this of course calls for experts, and we are
thus led on to our second point. We ask that the teachers in Negro
schools and colleges should in deed and in truth be specialists. He
who would teach any American youth in the new day, and certainly any
Negro American youth, should be a genuine psychologist and sociologist
and a large-hearted Christian man at the same time that he is a most
thorough student in his own department. By "specialist" we do not mean
a man who in English would count up the infinitives in Gower's poems,
but one who in grammar, for instance, could bring from a broad
scholarly background such a capacity for illustration as would inspire
his students to be honestly more careful in their speaking or writing.
The teacher of geometry would be one who could genuinely teach boys to
think better; and with the true teacher of Latin, boys would have no
desire to be dishonest. Whatever is taught should be dynamic; now as
never before it must justify itself in terms of human life. Such
instructors for our youth would call for such an outlay for education
as has not yet been dreamed of. They could not be ready, however,
until they had passed through a long period of preparation; and for
such an investment they should later of course be adequately paid.
Along with better teachers would go better equipment generally. Mr.
Carnegie has given several library buildings, for instance. We wish
now that somebody would give some books to put in them. More than one
of the Negro colleges have no regular library appropriation. Whenever
a book is bought it must be taken out of current funds and thus be
stolen from some other legitimate use. And yet some people presume to
sneer at what these institutions have done!
The third matter is a large and subtle one. It has to do with the
whole moral and spiritual import of the schools in question. One of
the amazing things about Negro education in the large in America is
that one hears so much about boards and units and courses of study and
so little about deeper essentials. Aside from the curriculum, what is
the atmosphere that a boy breathes as soon as he sets foot on a
college campus? Is he trained in honesty, in politeness, in high
ideals of speech, in lofty conceptions of character? Does he have to
obey orders? Is he taught to be neat, prompt, and industrious? Such
questions are of things too often taken for granted, and too often
lacking. We need new emphasis on the whole missionary impulse in
education. In the providence of God, but through no effort of his own,
the freedman in the decades after the Civil War had the benefit of
the labors of consecrated men and women who served, sometimes even
without pay, for his salvation. Cravath at Fisk, Graves at Morehouse,
Tupper at Shaw, Ware at Atlanta, Armstrong at Hampton, and Packard and
Giles at Spelman are names that should ever be recalled with
thanksgiving and praise. These men and women were not people of means.
They labored often with the most inadequate facilities. And yet
somehow they had the key to the eternal verities. They were earnest,
efficient, and true, and to them a human soul was worth more than the
kingdoms of this world.
Such consecrated workers, however, have now become rarer and rarer.
Materialism and commercialism are abroad in the land. Segregation and
proscription and injustice abound. We plead now that in all the
disappointments and distractions of the new day our teachers shall at
least remember the faith and high ideals of the pioneers, and remain
close to God.
To train our boys in the virtues of citizenship and at the same time
in knowledge of the rights of others; to teach them respect for others
at the same time that they cultivate their own self-respect; to teach
them the value of scholarship and also to let them know when
scholarship must become dynamic; to teach them to work, to love, to
sing, to have faith, even when they see wrong all around them--this is
a task calling for all one has of Christianity, of scholarship, and of
delicacy.
VI
A GREAT MISSIONARY: JOANNA P. MOORE
In the fall of 1862 a young woman who was destined to be a great
missionary entered the Seminary at Rockford, Illinois. There was
little to distinguish her from the other students except that she was
exceedingly plainly dressed, and seemed forced to spend most of her
spare time at work. Yes, there was one other difference. She was older
than most of the girls--already thirty, and rich in experience. When
not yet fifteen she had taught a country school in Pennsylvania. At
twenty she was considered capable of managing an unusually turbulent
crowd of boys and girls. When she was twenty-seven her father had
died, leaving upon her very largely the care of her mother. At
twenty-eight she already looked back upon a career of fourteen years
as a teacher, of some work for Christ incidentally accomplished, but
also upon a fading youth of wasted hopes and unfulfilled desires.
Then came a great decision--not the first, but one of the most
important that marked her long career. Her education was by no means
complete, and at whatever cost she was determined to go to school.
That she had no money, that her clothes were shabby, that her mother
needed her, made no difference; now or never she would realize her
ambition. She would do anything, however menial, if it was honest and
would give her food while she attended school. For one long day she
walked the streets of Belvidere looking for a home. Could any one use
a young woman who wanted to work for her board? Always the same reply.
Nightfall brought her to a farmhouse in the suburbs of the town. She
timidly knocked on the door. "No, we do not need any one," said the
woman who greeted her, "but wait until I see my husband." The man of
the house was very unwilling, but decided to give her shelter for the
night. The next morning he thought differently about the matter; and a
few days afterward the young woman entered school. The work was hard;
fires were to be made, breakfasts on cold mornings had to be prepared,
and sometimes the washing was heavy. In the midst of it all, the time
for lessons was frequently cut short or extended far into the night.
But the woman of the house was kind, and her daughter a helpful
fellow-student.
The next summer came another season at school-teaching, and then the
term at Rockford. 1862! a great year that in American history, one
fraught with great events, and more famous for the defeat of the Union
arms than for their success. But in September came Antietam, and the
heart of the North took courage. Lincoln now issued a preliminary
proclamation, "That on the first day of January, in the year of our
Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as
slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people
whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be
then, thenceforward, and forever, free."
The girls at Rockford, like the people everywhere, were interested in
the great events shaking the nation. A new note of seriousness crept
into their work. Embroidery was laid aside; instead, socks were knit
and bandages prepared. On the night of January 1 a jubilee meeting was
held in the town. At last the black man was free and everywhere
throughout the North there were shouts of joy.